How to start a book club

[TeenHelp]

How to start a book club
By Jenna (~Abibliophobe~)

If you are someone who likes to read, getting involved in a book club might be something that interests you. However, depending on where you live, there might not be any book clubs available for you to join. This article is going to outline the things you can do to start a book club. The first thing you need to decide is if you want to start a book club online or in person. This will help you to determine how you should go about setting up the book club and finding people who would be interested in joining.

A face to face book club:

The first thing you should do is find people who are interested in joining a book club. You can look for people around work, school, the library and through talking to friends and family. If you are new to town or don’t know a lot of people it could be helpful to start a page at Meetup, which is a website where people are able to find clubs and groups in their area that they can join.

Once you have found people that are interested in joining the book club you should have an initial meeting to establish rules and to discuss where you will meet each month. Some book clubs meet up at one another's house. However, if you are uncomfortable with that there is nothing wrong with deciding to meet at a coffee shop or a restaurant. If you decide to meet at one another's house, you could all bring some snacks to eat while you are discussing books. It might also be a good idea to decide when you will meet up with the group. Will you meet on the weekend to ensure that more people are able to attend and what time will you all meet up?

Upon first meeting one another you should also plan out some of the books you would like to read and how many books you will read each month. Some book clubs only read one and others read two or more. In order to ensure that you have a variety of books to read, it might help to brainstorm genres that you’d like to read such as non-fiction, fiction, classics, or sci-fi. In order to keep track of all the books that you have decided on, it might be a good idea to write them down somewhere such as a note card.

It’s important to keep in touch with the people in the book club so you can send out invitations. If you aren’t privy to mass emailing people you can set up an Evite which will send out invitations. You can also set up a Facebook page where you and all the people in the group can keep in touch.

An online book club:

Not everyone has the ability to meet up with people. Sometimes their school or work schedule will not allow for it and other times they don’t have the transportation to get to the location. If that is the case you are more than welcome to set up an online book club.

If you do this, the main thing you are going to face is finding a place for the discussions to take place. If you are part of an online community you might be able to talk to the Administrator or look into the rules of the website and see if you would be able to start a book club on the site. Another place you can look to set up a book club is Goodreads which is an online community for people who read.

Once you have determined where you are going to set up the online book club, you can set up a poll to help you and your fellow group members decide on what book you would like to read for the month.

As soon as you have agreed on a book to read you can set up a thread to discuss the book. If you’d like you can set up more than one thread where you will be able to ask specific questions about the book. A lot of online book clubs tend to only have one thread set up where they are able to discuss the books freely.

Book clubs are an amazing thing to get involved in. Hopefully this has helped give you an idea on how to start a book club of your own. It might be worthwhile to check with people in your life to see if they’d be interested in getting involved in your book club.